


inculcation

by virginianwolfsnake



Category: A Series of Unfortunate Events (TV), A Series of Unfortunate Events - Lemony Snicket
Genre: Emotional Manipulation, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Pre-Canon, fernald backstory!, hope the back and forth shift doesn’t make this too hard to read, very morally questionable kit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-24
Updated: 2021-01-24
Packaged: 2021-03-16 17:02:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28959891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/virginianwolfsnake/pseuds/virginianwolfsnake
Summary: fernald didn’t know anything when he was fourteen.
Comments: 10
Kudos: 12





	inculcation

Fernald never wanted to be an actor.

He can hardly ever remember his lines, no matter how religiously he rehearses. They all disappear out of his mind when he is in front of an audience — whether that’s an audience of fifty, or ten, or even one. Secondly, he’s been told he has no  _ feeling _ , and, truthfully, he has to agree. He hears the words come from his mouth on stage in a stiff, wooden staccato, like an alien learning to speak in a language humans can understand for the first time. Finally, he lacks the confidence; the shoulders-back, clear-voiced sheer  _ bravado _ . He’s been told he’ll need that.

His lack of ambition, skill or passion hasn’t stopped him coming to his classes, but he has to admit that is less as a result of the subject matter than it is as a result of the teacher. 

While Olaf is a poor actor in theatrical terms, he is a master of the skill he is  _ really _ trying to teach them, which Fernald thinks is probably just lying believably. He could walk right up to a sheriff with blood on his hands, and walk away categorised as nothing more than a valuable witness. Sometimes he talks so much that people are too confused to see through the white haze of nonsense spewing from his mouth, and sometimes he says very little and relies on a practiced, baffled fluster and a shrug of his slim shoulders. Sometimes, the sheer force of his own ego carries him through. No matter which tactic he employs, he never seems to lose. 

He isn’t sure when this skill Olaf wants them to learn is going to come in useful, or for what. The truth is that he doesn’t care to speculate. In his youth, he learned plenty of skills that have all come to nothing, and fester now, mostly forgotten, in the back of his mind.

At fourteen, he even trained salmon. In fact, he started earlier — but he remembers being fourteen, watching the young fish swim relentlessly against the fake current in their training tank. The latest group were the finest of their attempts; the strongest swimmers, due to changes to the mechanism providing their exercise in the tank, and far more sensitive to smoke than previous cohorts. 

Because he was fourteen, and therefore had no reason to believe such a thing would never happen, Fernald remembers believing that one day he would progress from salmon into other animals. Other volunteers had trained bats, he had heard, and snakes and eagles and even lions, and doing such a thing at some later point in his life had seemed not only impossibly exciting, but also completely attainable. 

When he remembers the salmon, he remembers Fiona. She was not helpful in the training process, and only ever seemed interested in slapping at the water with her round fists. This disrupted them time and again, but Fernald never minded that — she laughed every time she did it, no matter how many times, and her pure amusement was infectious. Her eyes always lit up as she watched the silvery fish swerving in the water, and when he looked after her alone, he brought her down to see them in secret and laughed as much as she did, simply at her reactions. 

When he remembers Fiona at that age, with her round cheeks and her wide eyes, he remembers a strange visitor. 

The details are lost to time, but there was an impression that he had arrived uninvited. In the memory, he is a sort of slender shape, with flecks of silver in his light hair that gave him the appearance of an older man, but with bright, canny eyes. Fernald usually wouldn’t have cared much if they had company, but he had caught this strange visitor flicking thumbtacks suspiciously near to his baby sister’s crib and watched very much more carefully after that. Because he was fourteen, he thought he was some sort of hero. 

His mother had scooped Fiona from her cot and cradled her close, before disappearing off into the depths of the house — as far away from their guest as she could get, it seemed. She inclined her head to him, with pointed, widened eyes, but Fernald pretended not to see. He settled himself with a book at the other end of the room, as innocently as he could, while the men sat uneasily around the dinner table. He never liked to be left out.

“So,” his stepfather eventually said, when it appeared he had become tired of the nonsensical ramblings of his slightly intoxicated guest. “What will you do now?”

“I haven’t decided.” Fernald risked a short glance at the table, and saw that some of the fire that had seemed to be keeping the man animated, with his sweeping gestures and dramatic declarations, had seeped out after this admission. He finally rested back in his chair, at something resembling peace, as if he had only really wanted someone to listen. 

“Revenge, though. I take it that’s on the agenda?”

A strange, tense look passed between them then. Glittering blue eyes quirked up and appeared to calculate, above an inscrutable straight line of a mouth and a jaw set tight. 

“Do you think it’s getting to about the time where you will have to pick your side yet, sea captain?” 

“Is that what you have done?”

Another tense, strange pause, followed by a kind of dramatic flourish and a bark of a laugh. “Oh, no,” the stranger replied. “I won’t be anyone’s puppet from now on. I’m going to follow my own orders. It’ll be refreshing.”

“But surely you want to do some damage to the side that hurt you,” his stepfather probed. “And in doing so, you’ll be helping the other.”

“Who cares?” the bright-eyed man cried flippantly. “Why should  _ I _ be the only one to care about the collateral damage?”

When Fernald glanced up, he saw his stepfather looking concerned, with his brow furrowed and his eyes focused on his hands. He didn’t seem to know how to respond, which was strange, because the answer was obvious to Fernald. It should have been obvious to anyone with their shared training. 

He cleared his throat pointedly and both men’s heads turned to look at him. “But what about the greater good?” he asked, a touch less stridently than he would have liked. 

His stepfather grimaced, and their guest threw his head back immediately and laughed, as if that was the funniest thing he had heard for a very long time. He laughed so much that he had to wipe his eyes, for so long that Fernald’s cheeks had plenty of time to redden in embarrassment and he had plenty of time to worry that he had completely misunderstood the conversation. When the stranger eventually looked back at Fernald, after he caught his breath, his bright eyes were bloodshot and pink rimmed, and he gave him an almost pitying look. “You don’t know anything yet.”

The recollection of that, the biting comment as clear to him as if it had happened only yesterday, stings somewhere deep. He had been so secure in the kind of black and white knowledge of a child then. He had listened, but not heard. 

Anyway, is there any point in ruminating over the past? They have finished their lesson for today, and some of them have elected to leave to go back to whatever their lives look like outside of these twice-weekly sessions. Fernald doesn’t have anywhere to be, though, so he stays behind. Those strange, introspective twins always linger, too. He gets the sense they have nowhere to be either. 

Olaf never seems to mind. He doesn’t treat them as though they are his friends, but Fernald has often had the sense that he is lonelier than he lets on. He lives here alone in this enormous house in this quiet corner of the City — inherited, he’d told them — and seems to do nothing aside from watching the furniture collect dust and the wallpaper peel, and waiting for these acting classes he halfheartedly runs on Tuesday and Thursday nights. In any case, he never complains when some of them stick around, grey figures in his reception hall, playing cards and drinking his supply of wine.

Fernald has even fallen asleep here twice. On the first occasion, he woke the next morning and scrambled out the door fearing that he had outstayed his welcome. On the second, Olaf had demanded breakfast on the Wednesday morning, and he’d ended up staying all the way through until Thursday, cramped onto the compact sofa in the hall. 

Fernald doesn’t know where he stands in this house from one minute to the next, but he feels oddly safe here nonetheless. He never gets that powerless, quicksand feeling in his stomach here. The cards are all on the table in this house, and if he doesn’t like what’s on them, he knows where he can find the door. 

There is still plenty of mystery; Olaf talks incessantly about nothing, but never seems to say anything  _ real _ , so that Fernald could list all of the man’s proposed titles for future plays he hasn’t yet written but couldn’t say anything about his childhood to his friends to even his last name with any certainty. But he knows the important things. He knows the name  _ Snicket _ , and he knows that ties them together.

He remembers Kit more than he would care to. She is a fuzzy presence from forever ago, and he has no idea when she appeared in his life first — though he will never forget how she left it, and for reasons he doesn’t quite understand he still finds himself dreaming about their regular meetings in that town by the sea. When he thinks about the time  _ before _ that, before everything, he places her aboard the Queequeg, with her hair tucked into her diving suit. The story went that, before Fernald ever knew his stepfather, she had been the one to acquire and make adjustments to his treasured submarine. 

At seventeen, he had been so desperate to be taken seriously. What he may have meant by that at the time, he now has no idea. But he does remember that when Kit visited, he tried his best to insert himself into her conversations with his stepfather, tried to make himself seem like an adult who could join in with their secret codes and important messages. 

By that age, he had come to realise that his stepfather was only a relatively young man, and didn’t take kindly to being babied by him. Kit never babied him; not once. 

“No need,” she had smiled, when his stepfather had suggested he give them some privacy to talk alone. He felt rather vindicated and important when she looked at him. “Fernald is quite old enough to hear this, in my opinion.” 

Kit had an impressive way of speaking that, while polite and pleasant, somehow permitted absolutely no argument. His stepfather, outnumbered, had nodded his head in an unhappy surrender, and Fernald had eagerly pulled up a chair to sit beside them at the table. 

They didn’t explain anything to him about what they were talking about, and Fernald hadn’t wanted to interject and risk his newfound position of importance, so much of their discussion had gone over his head. They both talked around issues in the same way, never quite saying one thing or the other, which only made it more difficult to follow. They discussed people using only their initials — several, it seemed, with the same one — and, having never met any of them, Fernald had little to add to their assessment of G’s research project, J’s concern, or B’s apparently misplaced optimism. 

“It’s dangerous,” Kit had preached, to an already converted and perhaps somewhat confused audience. “Can you imagine the consequences of unleashing something so awful?”

His stepfather looked perturbed. “Who said anything about unleashing?”

Kit pursed her lips. “Who’s to say he wouldn’t? He is becoming so unmanageable.”

While his stepfather took a pause, Fernald finally felt he had enough information about the activities of this rogue volunteer called G to sensibly interject, and so he spoke up on his behalf. “But nobody from the organisation would use something dangerous against innocent people.”

Kit gave him a strange look, as if she wasn’t sure where to begin in responding to that. The moment where she opened her mouth to speak, then sighed and closed it again, was the only one where he had ever felt patronised by her.

“In any case,” she muttered, as though the explanation she had been turning over in her mind in those brief moments was actually best left unsaid. “Something so powerful shouldn’t be in the hands of one person, no matter how pure their intentions might be.” She lingered, Fernald couldn’t help noticing, on the  _ might _ . “And G is power hungry. He wouldn’t be my choice for an ideal candidate to have such destructive capability at his fingertips.”

“Aye,” his stepfather said, quite thoughtfully. He wasn’t usually given to musing on a problem — he liked to trust his instincts, to do something, anything, as quickly as possible. He always said that you shouldn’t hesitate. He said it so often, in fact, that at seventeen, Fernald could hear it in his head, like a constant drumbeat driving him forward, whenever he wanted to pause and breathe. “What do you propose?”

“The research programme should be discontinued. The results should be retained, as the property of the organisation as a whole, but not developed further.”

“But Gregor will not accept that?” 

“Not yet.”

“Troubling. I could pay him a visit,” his stepfather suggested. “See if I can talk some sense into him.”

“I doubt that will help much,” Kit replied frankly. “Ike has been trying with him for months. Unfortunately, the volatile nature of their relationship has worked against us, and Gregor has got the impression by now that most of us feel the same way as his brother. He refuses point-blank to engage with any of us.”

“Us?”

“Ike and J first of all, of course, though Ike is keen to wash his hands of it now. I have visited several times, accompanied by R once. Even J —” Kit waved a hand. “ _ My _ J, I mean — has written.”

Fernald couldn’t help but wonder why they use initials at all if there are so many Js to contend with. His stepfather looked thoughtful again, shrugging his shoulders. “I probably can’t compete with that.”

“Indeed.” Here, Kit scooted marginally forward in her seat, her tea seemingly forgotten in front of her. “But I have been thinking about it. There might be someone else outside of our ordinary circle that could get close enough to report back on his actions.”

“Aye?” his stepfather nodded in agreement with her strategy. 

“Aye,” Kit agreed. Then, she had turned quite unexpectedly to Fernald. “So, what do you say, Fernald?” she asked, and he remembers being so shocked that he almost choked on his mouthful of tea. “Will you volunteer?”

He had been so eager to impress, but his stomach had still dropped. In hindsight, something somewhere deep down had known there was something wrong with all of it. Why hadn’t he asked more questions?

For someone who had been painted as such a villain, Fernald found himself rather disarmed when Gregor turned out to be a friendly man, and a good teacher. He had been waiting for years to have an apprentice, he’d said. He whistled while he worked, was always cheerful, and took one look at the paltry lunch Fernald had packed for himself on his first day and insisted on making him some of his apparently famous lasagne instead. 

The subject of his research aside, he didn’t seem like the man Fernald had been told to expect. But Kit had told him that people, and the things people did to each other, were rarely simply either good or bad. She visited regularly, though she couldn’t come inside and risk being spotted by Gregor — instead, she would write postcards pretending to be someone else, vaguely mentioning a day of the week, and Fernald would know when he collected Gregor’s mail that he would be expected in town to meet her on whatever day she specified. 

For the first few weeks, she would locate him in town and they would have coffee and she would ask him strange questions about his experiences so far. Though she never said as much, he often got the sense that she felt she was having to offer too much advice, as if he was a little behind the level she had come to expect even from a neophyte. In each of their conversations, he came away with the feeling that even though he was the one reporting back, she felt she was the one doing most of the real work.

“He doesn’t tell me much,” he had admitted, through a mouthful of the coconut cake Kit had purchased for him. 

“You must make sure you are asking the right questions, then,” she advised. “And find other ways to learn about his plans that don’t rely on him simply  _ telling _ you about them. Are you already reading his journals?”

He was so childishly affronted by that idea, the invasion of the privacy of the man who had so welcomed him, that it must have shown on his face. 

“ _ Fernald _ .” The sharpness of her tone had startled him, but by the time he looked up, she was unreadable again, face expressionless under her cloche hat. “Make sure you remember why you’re here.” 

“What do you  _ actually _ want to know?” he had asked, a little petulantly. It would have been easier to meet her expectations if she had ever communicated what they were. 

Kit sighed. Before she responded, she checked her watch, as she often did throughout their meetings. Whether this was because she had more interesting things to be doing or she was concerned that he would be missed at the aquatics centre, he was never sure. When she next spoke, though, her tone was gentle and patient. 

“You have to make some of these decisions on your own.” Feeling embarrassed by the veiled reprimand, Fernald found himself lowering his eyes. “Whatever G plans to do next could be catastrophic — and not just for you and I, and the other volunteers, but for  _ everyone _ . Do you understand that?”

He nodded sullenly. 

“So he needs to  _ trust _ you. You need to work out what he wants to do next. And then —” she paused, only momentarily, as if weighing the words carefully in her mouth before she released them. “You are the one there.  _ You _ need to tell  _ me _ what we should do after that.”

It made sense, but that didn’t mean he liked it. What Kit hadn’t seemed to understand was that he mostly followed Gregor around with a notepad and wrote down what he asked him to write down — they didn’t have philosophical discussions throughout the day on the morality of the research programme. Her constant references to the gravity of the situation made him feel panicked, closed in and pressured, but didn’t bring him any closer to understanding what exactly he was going to be able to do to avert the world-ending crisis she apparently predicted. He’d never felt so stupid in his life.

“We’re relying on you, Fernald. You have to do whatever it takes.” This made his stomach churn with anxiety, to the extent he wondered if he was going to bring that coconut cake straight back up again. Her smile was surely designed to be reassuring, but it didn’t help at all. 

Once he’d nodded, and forced his mouth into an approximation of the shape of a smile, she seemed to consider their conversation finished. She couldn’t drive him back to Anwhistle Aquatics and risk their association being spotted, so she waved him off at the corner of the street, and encouraged him to run back in case Gregor started to wonder what was taking him so long.

After that, there were no postcards for weeks. In that time, her words had rattled around in his mind endlessly, and he had dedicated his every waking moment to watching, listening and remembering. To Gregor, this must have indicated a sudden development of an interest in mycology after all, and he had been only too happy to accommodate it — even if Fernald could barely follow some of his scientific explanations. 

It had taken weeks, even from that point, but one night he finally felt he had reached the trusted footing Kit had predicated. They had both stayed late — Gregor had been trying to gather more information on storage of the fungus, and it had been an extremely long day in their airtight suits trying all manner of containers to see which would be a suitable vehicle for transport. Relatively few, as it turned out. The speed at which this weapon Kit Snicket was so afraid of managed to escape from its container, infiltrate the space around it and suffocate everything in its path, was truly terrifying. Gregor seemed rather optimistic about steel, but at least once it had proven not up to the task. 

“It doesn’t stay where you put it,” Fernald had commented, aware that this was not particularly artfully put. Gregor didn’t seem to mind his basic questions — he was excited to speak about his project and the individual experiments, though difficult to draw on its future. Fernald had taken a deep, quiet breath, and said, with forced nonchalance; “if you released it in a building, there’s nothing to say it wouldn’t be able to travel outside of it. On clothing, for example.”

Gregor had turned his head, but Fernald was careful to appear busy writing notes so as not to meet his eyes. 

“Not yet,” the mycologist said. “That’s what we’re trying to work on.”

Fernald hummed. “So, we want to make it so that you could — for the sake of argument,” he added hastily. “Make it possible to release it in a closed environment, without it then spreading outside of that closed environment via its spores.”

“A difficult task, with a fungus,” Gregor admitted, though he sounded by no means defeated. “That’s how they reproduce.”

“But, by the time you figure that out,” Fernald began carefully, having learned that it was often better to talk in terms of  _ when _ with Gregor than in terms of  _ if _ . He could be quite sensitive if his scientific brilliance were called into question. “Then what purpose will the fungus serve?”

There was a silence. Fernald had felt so certain then that he was about to be outed as a spy and evicted from the facility — a concept that filled him with a sort of dread, at the thought of Kit and his stepfather’s reactions, but also a swooping sense of guilty relief. 

“You must have figured that out by now,” Gregor said eventually. 

“No,” Fernald replied quickly. “I haven’t.”

“Or you just don’t want to say it.” Pushing back his chair, with a pronounced creak, Gregor had sat back to appraise his assistant. Unable to resist any longer, and at risk of looking guilty if he did, Fernald raised his head and looked the scientist in the eye. 

“Can’t you imagine it?” Gregor asked, crossing one leg over the other so that one ankle came to rest over the top of the other knee. “We have all worked all our lives to try to keep the world quiet — or restore it to a quiet state, depending on how you look at it. But we’ve never had even the tiniest bit of leverage. That’s why we haven’t succeeded. Just imagine: no more villainy in the world, and an insurance policy, of sorts, to ensure that our enemies can no longer create havoc.” 

Fernald frowned. “Because they would be too scared?”

Gregor chuckled. “That’s an interesting way of putting it. I suppose so.” Maybe he could see Fernald’s hesitance, so he scooted closer in his chair and tried a new tack in his argument. “If you think about it, we could protect all the good people from the evil ones in this world, if we could get this right. No more fires.”

“How will we know that we’re always on the side of the good people?” Fernald eventually asked. “It seems more complicated than black and white.”

Gregor genuinely laughed then, as though that wasn’t the question he had been expecting. “Don’t you mean, what if it falls into the wrong hands?”

“That too,” Fernald agreed. 

“Well, there is always going to be a level of risk associated with progress. If we want to change things for good, we need to have the courage to face those fears — and I believe we could keep this safe, if we tried hard enough. It wouldn’t take long until there were no ignoble people left who wanted to steal it from us.”

Creating a world where people are too scared to do anything, except what people like Gregor or the other volunteers permit, doesn’t seem to be exactly progress to Fernald, regardless of the safety considerations that seem to be Kit’s major concern. 

“And what about the first part?” he asked. “How will we know that we’re the good, rather than the evil?”

“I can’t answer that.” Gregor admitted, frowning at him. “I believe in the inherent good of our organisation and the people in it. If you don’t, I don’t think I can convince you.”

Of course, Fernald believed he was on the right side. But it made his head spin that both Gregor and Kit felt that they were also on that same right side, when in fact one of them was so much  _ more _ right than the other. How many more versions of rights and wrongs are there? And of course, Fernald believed that Kit could be trusted — if this fungus were used for Gregor’s terrifying purpose, she would know what to do with it, and she wouldn’t hurt anyone who didn’t deserve it — but how many more just like Gregor exist in their their organisation, who just haven’t revealed themselves yet? 

He didn’t sleep that night. He had never been so relieved to see a postcard arrive in his life. 

Once she had heard him out, Kit took a long, calm sip of her tea. Expecting a bigger update this time following her previous instructions, they had taken their warm drinks out to a bench overlooking the sea for additional privacy. 

“Figure out how to stop him,” she said, utterly nonchalantly, once she had finished her sip. 

“ _ What? _ ” Fernald couldn’t help but yelp. He remembers feeling so anxious that he could barely catch his breath, but Kit hadn’t even seemed surprised. “I can’t — he still barely tells me anything, and he won’t listen to me if he wouldn’t listen to you.”

“He trusts you.” Kit’s canny eyes appraised him coolly. “You said he leaves you alone in the evenings now, to lock up. You did that first part — a few weeks ago, you didn’t think you could.”

“If I challenge him,” Fernald pointed out, still shocked. “He will shut me out. He might even realise that I’ve been talking to you.”

Kit inclined her head thoughtfully, and then stared out at the coastline. “The best way might not be to challenge him directly.”

He waited for her to continue, to say anything even  _ remotely _ useful, but nothing else came. Sometimes, when he looked at her, he thought he could see her lips pressing together, as though there were instructions she was trying to resist giving him.

“Do you really expect me to —” he paused, trying to think through the consequences. Every time he saw her now, her strange suggestions only served to remind him of the urgency and gravity of his situation, the burden he was expected to carry entirely alone, and talking to her always made him feel impossibly more panicked than before he set off for the town. “Do you really expect that I will be able to stop Gregor from undertaking his research? He won’t even  _ speak _ to his brother since he asked for the same!”

“Fernald,” Kit said, in the tone of a long-suffering parent. Not for the first time, she was seeming tired of this conversation, and, not for the first time, he wanted to ask,  _ if I’m so useless, why am I here?  _ “You are there with Gregor, and  _ I _ am not. One way or another — that part is for  _ you _ to figure out — you need to neutralise him.”

Fernald frowned then. There was a brief moment of clarity between them, when she seemed to recognise his distaste for the clinical term, and she had widened her eyes and breathed a little breezy laugh, as though embarrassed at her own phrasing. “You know what I mean,” she smiled eventually. “Whatever it takes.”

Perhaps he could have just packed his bag and gone home that day, instead of turning those words over and over and  _ over _ in his head. What would have happened if he’d said goodbye to Gregor, perhaps made some flimsy excuse about feeling unwell, and simply boarded the coach that night and never returned? His stepfather would have been irritated, probably, and Kit would have been furious. But maybe his mother would have understood. 

Mercifully, he’s out of wine, and that distracts him temporarily. He’s only had three glasses; it’s not the drink that makes him remember, though it doesn’t seem to be helping him forget. There are still five of them here — Olaf is lounging across a chair, glaring at the outdoors, the twins are looking quietly at the floor, and the very tall man is sitting cross legged on the floor, which puts him in perfect position to pour Fernald another drink when he spots him lifting his glass. 

Before they can all slip back into their individual reveries, Olaf rises from his reclined position with a calculating look on his face, looking around at his rag-tag little band of lost souls with the kind of narrowed eyes that indicate a plan. 

“I need your help with something.”

They pile into the car outside, and he absurdly tries not to scratch the beaten up leather with his hooks, folding his arms tight across his lap. He gets in first, followed by the pale, long-nosed student he has never spoken to, followed by the girls — and ridiculously, because the girls don’t appear to be able to be separated by more than a couple of inches even for a moment, all four of them end up piled in together in the backseat, with the passenger side empty. It has the effect of mirroring their lessons — the teacher, at the front, and the sad little students sat watching. 

“Which one of you wants to drive?” Olaf aims this question squarely into the left hand seats, apparently assuming that the twins are either unsuitable candidates or won’t know how. 

“I can,” Fernald finds himself saying.

Olaf pauses only momentarily. He has never particularly demonstrated tact, and Fernald can see the words forming in his mind, being redesigned, and then the flash of irritation when he decides to just be frank rather than to contort himself around pleasantries.

“You  _ still _ can, even without your hands?”

Other people might have dressed it up a little better, but Fernald doesn’t mind. He likes knowing what the question is. He likes clarity. “I only learned when I came to the City,” he replies placidly.

“Perfect.” Satisfied, he turns back to face the road as the engine splutters to life. “I will drive us there, you drive us back. Keep an eye on the road so you remember the way.”

When they arrive, they stop on a quiet, dark road in front of a modest little house, with a porch and a chimney and an old, chipped red front door.

“Now,” Olaf says, at length, and then pauses for a moment. When he turns in his seat, he is smiling in what he probably assumes is an approximation of a reassuring, friendly manner, as though they are just about to go for an ice cream and a gentle walk around the park. Fernald has a feeling they won’t be doing either. He has that strange bright shine to his eyes again, like he knows something they don’t. “Girls, you know how to pick a lock, don’t you?”

They nod silently, in perfect, creepy synchrony. How he knows that Fernald isn’t sure. 

“And you,” he motions vaguely to the tall man next to Fernald in the middle seat, having quite clearly also forgotten his name. “You don’t need to do much. Just come inside and keep watch.”

“Keep watch for what?” the tall man asks, in his deep, deep voice. That’s a wrong question if Fernald has ever heard one. 

“What do you think?” Olaf scoffs. Then, he plucks the keys from the ignition and tosses them to Fernald, where they briefly hit his chest and then come to rest in his lap. “And you, get in the front seat. Give me ten minutes and then start the engine again. Time it.”

One of the twins delicately clears her throat. “Are there people in there?”

“No,” Olaf responds, with a roll of his eyes that suggests he finds the question inane. “They aren’t here.”

Fernald waits for someone else to say it, but they all seem like they’ve had their immediate questions answered, so it’s left to him. 

“Why are we here?” he asks tentatively, and Olaf’s intense eyes fix on him for a long moment, too long to be comfortable. Then, rather than answering, he reaches over and plucks his set of keys out of Fernald’s lap, dangling them instead in front of the tall man beside him until he takes them. 

“You can drive,” he decides. “And  _ you _ can come and see for yourself.”

Fernald feels like he’s slipping again. He’s had this same kind of creeping dread before, like vines climbing all over his body and pulling him down to the ground, like spores of a fungus creeping into his lungs and suffocating him second by second. One weekend, a month or so after Kit Snicket had told him to neutralise the threat, he had gone home to visit his family for a night. By then, Fiona had started to take an interest in books, precocious as she was - though she still mostly liked the pictures. He sat on the floor with her that afternoon and flicked through the story books, until she brought him an illustrated volume on mycology. 

He’d burnt that book later that night, after she was in bed. By then, he was starting to think that a little bit of knowledge could be a dangerous thing.

His stepfather had caught him in the act, but hadn’t seemed surprised. He’d been watching him closely all day, observing quietly, and was surprisingly less bombastic than normal when he eventually caught his stepson alone and produced a desk of cards from his pocket. 

By the time Fernald had lost three rounds, he knew there would be no question in his stepfather’s mind that something was bothering him. He hadn’t lost at that game since he was about thirteen. He had come to expect that there was no real advice any of the older volunteers would give him — Kit was so unclear all the time that he had come to believe that was part of his mission, to work out what to do as a result of her vague comments and half-thoughts. But, when the story spills out that night over the game of cards, all at once in a jumbled, anxious mess, his stepfather proves him wrong by offering direct help rather than endless, mysterious questions. 

“It’s okay,” he said, strangely comfortingly. Fernald had only been about fifteen when he truly realised how young his stepfather was, and he hadn’t ever really appreciated his attempts to be a father figure, but just this once he found himself glad of it. “I know what to do.”

“Really?” Fernald had squeaked, and hated himself for the weak, desperate tone of his voice. 

The sea captain nodded, and clasped his shoulder across the narrow table that separated them. “He who hesitates is lost, Fernald. Didn’t I teach you well enough?”

And, well, is there any point in remembering what next? Knowing that there isn’t doesn’t stop it — too fast, like scrolling too quickly through one of Fiona’s picture books, the moments come back to him in hideous, fantastic clarity. The thick, choking smell of kerosene, the papers crushed and torn in his hands, the matchbook in his pocket. The smoke, the sick feeling in his stomach, the recognition of the minuscule line, in his own mind, between martyr and monster. And then there was Gregor, the villain snarling on the gangway, with his eyes lit madly from the flames beneath them. It was easy to see it then, everything Kit had said. It was easy to see it if you tried to see it. 

His stepfather appeared then from the steps, as the fire took hold in the floor above. “Gregor,” he called, stern and stoic as the building around them burned. “It’s over now. Come with us.”

Gregor hadn’t seemed interested in those words, or concerned by his appearance at all. His gaze was fixed entirely, unwaveringly, on Fernald. “How could you?” he bellowed. “ _ Why _ would you? Didn’t you understand? This was for the greater good!”

His stepfather responded on his behalf, which was for the best, because Fernald couldn’t think of a single thing to say. “No, Gregor. We don’t see it that way. You’re the one trying to destroy us all!”

Eventually, Gregor simply laughed. It wasn’t an ordinary laugh — born from his fury, it was more like a hacking sound ripped from his throat. “I can do it all again,” he hissed. “You really think the  _ building _ makes any difference to me,  _ firestarters?  _ You know, you’re the kind of people that, one day, I’ll be able to stop.”

“ _ No _ ,” Fernald’s chest had clenched with that too-familiar panic. “All of your research —”

“You underestimated me,” Gregor interrupted, with a sad, angry shake of his head. He was calmer then, reassured by the thought of re-establishing his programme without the interference of his brother, out from under the eyes of the rest of the organisation. The same realisation, dawning at the same time, made Fernald’s stomach drop. “You and Snicket, too.”

The flames were spreading more quickly than Fernald would have predicted. Having never seen a fire in real life before, he was surprised by its easy destruction. It was like the mycelium, in a way, and in that moment, that struck him as totally appropriate. Gregor was one of their enemies in disguise, even to himself, as an associate.

“Come on, Fernald,” his stepfather had tugged his arm, seemingly having hesitated here enough. “Let’s go.”

But what his stepfather failed to understand, in that moment, is that these were not his orders. How is the threat  _ neutralised _ if the man at the helm is still here, more determined than ever to continue his dangerous projects, and now planning to keep them a secret?

He doesn’t remember the moment he did it. He knows, distantly, as of watching himself on film, that he escaped his stepfather’s grip and darted toward Gregor on the gangway, throwing himself at him at full force. He thinks he thought about the greater good, and how the world could never be quiet with this man in it, and then, in the struggle, they both slipped over the railing. 

It could only have been a miracle that he didn’t lose consciousness, though of course it didn’t feel like one at the time. Gregor landed less favourably, and Fernald registered the sickening shape of his leg and his neck, but that was all he had time to see before he had noticed that the floor was  _ so _ hot, with the flames rising around them. He managed to scramble to his feet shakily, driven by pure adrenaline, but the aluminium door handle had taken on the heat of the flames, and by the time he managed to unlock the bolts and wrench open the handle his hands were slippery with his own boiling blood, though he could no longer feel the pain of them.

He doesn’t remember what happened after that. He only knows about the hospital bed. His stepfather only ever visited once while he was recovering there, several days after the fact. By then, Fernald had crafted so many versions of the events in his mind that he no longer felt truly able to tell whether he was in the right or in the wrong, but there was a nagging, crawling guilt that wouldn’t ever subside regardless. When he’d seen his stepfather’s downcast eyes, his hands in his pockets, that feeling had grown more insistent than ever.

“It was all I could think to do,” he explained, when it had become clear that the sea captain had no intention of taking a seat. “I didn’t — you can’t hesitate. Isn’t that right?”

He will never forget the response when he said that. His stepfather’s face crumbled and his eyes closed, as though he had heard the worst news in the world. 

“ _ You _ said —” Fernald began numbly.

“I did  _ not _ ,” his stepfather interrupts, sounding stung. “I had no idea  _ that _ was what you were thinking. I had no idea you thought like that at all.”

“It was what we had to do,” Fernald remembers saying, sounding younger than he was. “It was for the greater good.”

“No,” his stepfather had said, the disgust as clear in his tone as in his expression. The fight had drained from him and it showed in his posture — shoulders collapsing, spine bending — and his final words on the subject, his final words to his stepson altogether, were delivered in a distant monotone. “You don’t know what good is.” 

In that moment, in the midst of the crashing betrayal, the image of those bloodshot blue eyes returned to him. He didn’t know anything when he was fourteen after all. 

In the grand scheme of things, this apparent burglary doesn’t seem anywhere near as bad as arson and murder. What’s one more mark against his name?

Once the twins have gotten the back door open, Fernald doesn’t go immediately to his assigned post at the front window to keep watch, and Olaf doesn’t seem to care either way. The place is dark, and relatively barren. It looks barely lived-in, as if whoever stays here rarely uses it, and merely houses scattered mismatched furniture, papers, endless soft-cover books bent around themselves, and the occasional item of clothing strewn over a chair, a dark jacket over a dining chair and a patterned scarf on the arm of the single couch. This is a place where people keep things — not one to be called a home. 

Olaf is tearing through the house like a man possessed, opening drawers and peeking behind closed curtains and overturning waste paper bins, looking for something unknown. Fernald knows him well enough by now to be certain that if he wanted help he’d ask for it, and that asking what he’s searching for will be futile if he doesn’t want to share. Instead, he wanders through this mostly empty house, with its peeling wallpaper and its loose carpet tiles, occasionally peeking out into the street.

On a whim, and because there is nothing else to do, he plucks a newspaper from the chipboard dining table and flicks through it. The headlines in this paper aren’t as shocking as the ones he read a year ago — the ones proclaiming him the traitor of the century, a volatile lone actor who had done something so utterly terrible for seemingly absolutely no reason, the ones with that name at the top:  _ Jacques Snicket.  _

He remembers gasping while he read, not simply because of the portrayal of his motivations in the article, but also simply at the name of its author.  _ Snicket _ . He read the front page over and over, that day, but he still simply couldn’t understand why it said the things it did. He’d never met Jacques, but he knew he was Kit’s brother, and he remembers thinking, frantically,  _ don’t they speak? Doesn’t he know this is what I was told to do? Does Kit understand?  _ He remembers so vividly thinking that if only she would come back, he could explain, and they could get to the bottom of all of this misunderstanding. But he never could contact her — he never knew how. She would find him if she wanted to, but she never did again. She  _ never did _ . 

By then, only just eighteen, he was not only terrified, not only scarred forever, not only somehow a wanted man. Worse than all of that, he was alone. The organisation that had underpinned so much of his life had pulled their support away like a rug from under his feet, and in his mind, when he found hiding places in the City under the cover of darkness like a rat, he couldn’t help but think —  _ I don’t deserve this.  _ He chants it to himself at night in the abandoned apartment with the smashed window, over the sound of the sirens in the street.  _ I don’t deserve this. _ Kit had said  _ whatever it takes.  _ In hindsight, don’t  _ whatever it takes _ and  _ he who hesitates is lost _ sound a little similar? 

He flips the page of the paper at random, without ever really reading the words. He only stops because, on the seemingly innocuous eighth page, someone has taken care to go through the article underlining the words — picking out the code, he knows — and, at the bottom, there is a note, in a painfully recognisable wild, almost illegible scrawl. 

_ J — has anyone checked at the vineyard? Call me. K  _

The room spins when the pieces click together. It is only Olaf coming up behind him, plucking the paper gently from his hands and ripping it into shreds, that keeps him standing. 

“Why are we here?” he asks again, in a whisper — even though it is clear that neither of the siblings are here to hear them. 

“Why not?” Olaf asks flippantly. He doesn’t seem to have found whatever he has been looking for, unless it is hidden on him somewhere, but he also doesn’t seem to care. He turns away and rips pages from notebooks, dropping them all into a pile on the old armchair with the remainder of the newspaper. Once he is satisfied with his destruction, he turns back to his new student and seems to decide to give him a clear answer. It’s a rare thing in this world. 

“We’re sending a message,” he says, quite calmly. “We’re saying we haven’t forgotten.”

Fernald knows he’ll never forget. Even now, the memory of his own mistake, the way he was indoctrinated to make it, and the subsequent betrayal, hurts so much that it still sits in his chest like a heavy weight, rendering him breathless.

When they had first crossed paths again, Olaf — even stranger looking than he had been five years before, with the silver flecks in his hair evolving into broad streaks — hadn’t bothered to affect surprise that the wide-eyed fourteen year old who had once spat rehearsed lines about their  _ greater good  _ at him over his mother’s dining table had become this bleak-eyed figure. He just told him, with his knowing eyes, that he looked just like he had been chewed up and spat out. 

He can tell stories about them, opera night betrayals and murders and, all the while, such hypocrisy. The more he thinks about it, the more he wonders if they always intended to sacrifice him for this greater good of theirs — if any of them even share an understanding of what that is. His wrists itch, and his memory conjures the phantom sensation of his nails digging into his palms, when he wants to clench his fists. 

He is still learning dexterity with his new prosthetics, but he can hold the box well enough for Olaf to strike the match. 


End file.
